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Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s defense of the Three-Fifths Compromise — which he called “a great move” by the country’s founders toward ending slavery — has thrust the Republican official into the national spotlight and triggered sharp pushback from historians and civil rights groups.
The statement was made in a Thursday video posted to X in which Beckwith argued that the 18th century-era compromise limited the political power of pro-slavery states by not allowing them to count enslaved individuals as whole persons for congressional representation.
The video, shared on the last day of Indiana’s 2025 legislative session, was a response to Statehouse debate around Senate Enrolled Act 289. The heart of that measure, authored by Republican Sen. Gary Byrne, limits diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in schools, state government and health profession licensing. The bill advanced to the governor on Thursday but has not been signed.
Beckwith took aim at Senate Democrats, specifically, for likening the bill to historical policies — like the Three-Fifths Compromise — that “dehumanized” marginalized groups. Sen. La Keisha Jackson, D-Indianapolis, who invoked the compromise and its history during her chamber testimony, called the Republican-backed legislation “a fight against racial equality.”
“They were saying this is a bad bill because it actually just encourages discrimination, just like the Three-Fifths Compromise, going all the way back to the foundations of our nation,” Beckwith said. “I would like to share with you, the Three-Fifths Compromise is not a pro-discrimination compromise. It was not a pro-discrimination or a slave-driving compromise that the founders made. It was actually just the opposite. It was a compromise that the North made with the South.”
Beckwith’s official X account also doesn’t allow users to reply to the post.
Critics have since accused Beckwith of rewriting history and downplaying the horrors of slavery.
In a joint statement issued by the Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis, the Indiana Chapter of the National Action Network and the Alliance of Baptists, the groups labeled Beckwith’s interpretation as “historical revisionism” and called for a formal retraction. They emphasized that the compromise was about consolidating control and political power while denying enslaved individuals their humanity and rights.
The groups further urged Gov. Mike Braun to publicly denounce the comments, but the Republican governor has yet to comment on the matter.
The pushback was highlighted in news stories by The Washington Post, Fox News, Newsweek and other major outlets.
Also on Monday, the Indiana Senate Democratic caucus released a statement denouncing Beckwith’s comments.
“No compromise that counted human beings as fractions can ever be anything but a stain on our nation’s conscience,” it said. “The Three-Fifths Compromise entrenched the enslavement of people, empowered oppression and delayed justice by generations.”
Neither Beckwith nor his office have released an official statement about his remarks on the Three-Fifths Compromise, but the lieutenant governor continued to defend his position in the days following the video’s posting.
Alex Lichtenstein, a history professor at Indiana University, described Beckwith’s retelling of history as “a confusion between intention and long-term consequences.”
“The intention of the compromise was, quite frankly, to sell out Black people. That is to lock them into slavery for longer term in the interest of creating the union,” Lichtenstein said. “The argument that the Three-Fifths Compromise was actually passed with the intention of destroying or undermining slavery is just, frankly, laughable.”
In 1787, during the Constitutional Convention, the nation’s founders included “multiple concessions” in the U.S. Constitution to Southern states, “designed to preserve and protect the institution of slavery,” Lichtenstein said.
The most significant was the Three-Fifths Compromise, which allowed Southern states to count three-fifths of their enslaved population for congressional representation — effectively giving them more political power and preventing the union from easily abolishing slavery.
The history professor described Beckwith’s comments and the ensuing debate as “a much broader assault in the country, but particularly in this state,” on universities like IU, and on faculty’s ability “to recognize and teach a complex American history story.”
“They’d much rather have a simple, straightforward story. ‘Oh yeah, the founders were perfect. They might have held slaves, but fundamentally, they were themselves opposed to slavery, and in their infinite wisdom, they built in these clauses that they knew could be used to defeat slavery in the long-term.’ Apparently they just didn’t really tell anyone, nor did they count on a civil war to have to make it happen,” he continued. “They want a particular form of history which makes them feel comfortable, but unfortunately for them, it’s wildly inaccurate.”
‘Rewriting’ the nation’s history
In the video posted on the lieutenant governor’s official X account, Beckwith admonished Senate Democrats for saying on the chamber floor that Byrne’s bill “embodies something to the effect of the Three-Fifths Compromise.”
His remarks continued into a history lesson, of sorts:
“At the time, there were basically 13 independent nations. They had not really created a constitution. They were sort of a European Union-esque nation, and they were saying to the pro-slave states, ‘Hey, if you want to count your slaves to have representation — more representation — in Congress, we’re not gonna let you do that,’ because they knew that that would codify things like slavery into our nation.
And the North stood up to the South, and they said, ‘We’re going to count your property,’ because the South says, ‘Hey, this is our property, but we want to count them in the congressional representation. We want to count them in the census.’ At the time, 30,000 people would equal one member of Congress. And so they said, ‘We’re going to count our slaves. We’re going to get more members of Congress in the South.’ The North said, ‘You can’t do that.’ So when they came back to the South and they said, ‘Fine, if you want to count your property, your slaves, as whole people, we’re going to count our property. We’re going to count our tables, we’re going to count our chairs, we’re going to count all the stuff that we have in our house.’ And the South said, ‘Well, you can’t do that.’ And they said, ‘Well, you’re doing it with your property. We’re doing it with our property.’
So what they did is they came up with a Three-Fifths Compromise. They said you will only get three-fifths of a vote when it comes to your slave. And what that did, it actually limited the number of pro-slave representatives in Congress by 40%. This was a great move by the North to make sure that slavery would be eradicated in our nation. They knew what they were doing, but now, here you have Senate Democrats in today’s American Republic who do not understand that.”
Beckwith’s take on the compromise’s history appear to echo interpretations by David Barton, an author and political activist revered in evangelical circles for promoting the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. His interpretations of U.S. history have been met with significant criticism from many historians and scholars, however, who argue that Barton’s work contains inaccuracies and misrepresentations and proliferates the spread of “pseudo-history.”
Follow-up posts on Beckwith’s personal X account included a 2010 interview clip from Glenn Beck’s Fox News show, during which Barton described the Three-Fifths Compromise as a means to “cut the slavery representation in Congress in half.”
“When Frederick Douglass read that, he said, ‘The Three-Fifths Clause has nothing to do with worth. That has to do with representation. It makes it harder to get a pro-slavery representative in Congress. The Constitution’s an antislavery document,’ Barton said. “It was Frederick Douglass who points that out.”
Beckwith agreed with Barton, saying on X that “the great abolitionist, Fredrick Douglass, recognized the strategic value it gave our new nation in ultimately ending the evils of slavery and racial discrimination.”
He reiterated that “(w)ithout the 3/5ths Compromise there would be no United States” and “slavery would likely still be a normal part of the developed world.”
“It was a great step in the right direction which ultimately laid the foundation for the eradication of the evils of slavery and racial discrimination,” he said in on the social media site.
Intent vs. consequences
Lichtenstein said Douglass initially aligned with radical abolitionists who viewed the Constitution as “entirely pro-slavery.” In the 1840s, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, for example, “wanted to burn the Constitution and saw it as a “compact with the devil.”
But by the 1850s, Douglass shifted his stance. He began to see the Constitution as a potential tool to challenge slavery and recognized that the Three-Fifths Compromise “could be strategically used to undermine the institution of slavery,” turning a clause originally designed to protect slavery into a potential weapon against it.
Importantly, Lichtenstein emphasized, Douglass’s approach was “tactical” — not a wholesale endorsement of the original intent of the compromise.
Additionally, the abolitionist never denied the the Three-Fifths Compromise was initially passed to benefit Southern slave-holding states. Instead, Douglass strategically reinterpreted the clause to advance abolitionist goals.
“Frederick Douglass was the most woke person you can imagine in the 1850s,” Lichtenstein said. “These folks who heroicize Frederick Douglass either are being disingenuous or don’t know what they’re talking about.”
The professor made clear, as well, that there is “no disagreement” among historians and academics about the original intent of the Three-Fifths Compromise.
There were other pro-slavery provisions, too, like the Slave Trade Clause, which prohibited Congress from ending the slave trade until 1808.
“That meant there were 20 more years to bring in as many slaves from Africa as you like, which amounted to over one-third of the total slave imports to the colony (and later the United States) over the entire period of the slave trade,” Lichtenstein said.
Separately, the Fugitive Slave Clause required the return of escaped enslaved people to their owners.
“These were deal breakers for the South. They weren’t deal breakers for the North,” Lichtenstein noted.
Historians suggest that without these compromises, slavery might have been constitutionally abolished as early as the 1820s. The concessions were so effective at strengthening slavery that they ultimately emboldened the South to secede and go to war in 1861.
That framing of past events is “universally understood” among historians, Lichtenstein said, although there continues to be “vigorous discussion” about whether the Constitution could ultimately be considered an anti-slavery document, and about how abolitionists like Frederick Douglass strategically reinterpreted constitutional clauses.
Historians like Sean Wilentz contend that the Three-Fifths Compromise, while morally flawed, was a necessary limitation on slaveholder power and helped leave open a path toward slavery’s eventual abolition.
Other historians, including, Nicholas Guyatt, argue instead that the compromise strengthened slavery’s hold on national politics from the start and was not a tactical anti-slavery measure, but a structural embedding of racial injustice into the Constitution.
“What I find so ironic or peculiar about this is that the the extreme right-wing is always insistent on original intent of the Constitution. … But here, all of a sudden, when it comes to the three-fifths clause, they don’t seem to care about the original intent. For this, it’s the living document and how it was put to use later on,” Lichtenstein said. “You can’t have it both ways. If you believe in original intent, then you have to believe that the Three-Fifths Compromise was a concession to slavery in the Southern states.”
“We don’t glorify the founders because they had the magical crystal ball to realize that the Three-Fifths Compromise was going to be anti-slavery. No, they made a flawed compromise with the institution of slavery,” he added. “But we are fortunate enough that people came later on to recognize that that tool could be used for justice instead of injustice.”
The Indiana Capital Chronicle is an independent, nonprofit news organization that covers state government, policy and elections.
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